Kynn,
At 10:42 AM 6/17/00 -0700, Kynn Bartlett wrote:
>At 11:09 AM -0400 6/17/00, Michael Burks wrote:
>>The people who hold responsibility for letting this law go through without
>>challenging it are US! Yes US who should know better.
>
>Mike, keep in mind that on an international list, not everyone here
>is going to be responsible for the laws in any given country.
Agreed.
>Also, in my opinion, there is not much that I -- as an American
>citizen in this case -- could do to affect such a law passing or not;
>in many cases (as with the CDA a few years ago) we just have to hope
>that the courts will be fairer than the legislature, especially
>during an election year.
Well, a comment on the side of optimism here for a moment -- it actually is
not always so hard to have input into development of legislation. Some of
the factors that help are timing and contacts -- passing along information
and concerns to the right people at the right time, and that means being on
top of legislative development in one's own country enough to know when
it's time to look at something more closely and talk to people about it.
But it's also really important to have a good analysis of what the
potential issues are, in terms of technical and/or policy problems; ways
that those issues can be addressed; and where possible the language one
might use to fix an accessibility problem. A good analysis, along with
suggestions for how to address any problems, is often welcomed by those
developing legislation, if it comes at a time when it can still be
incorporated. There's a network of policy advocates who can help develop
and pass along messages on potential accessibility barriers -- barriers
which are often accidental, arising from a lack of awareness of how
technology and policy intersect. The problem is ensuring that enough people
with technical expertise and people with policy expertise are working
together to spot these issues early enough and develop responses. And I
believe that that's do-able, within a number of countries, but that the
bulk of that work needs to happen on country-specific technology policy lists.
>Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>
Regards,
Judy
--
Judy Brewer jbrewer@w3.org +1.617.258.9741 http://www.w3.org/WAI
Director,Web Accessibility Initiative(WAI), World Wide Web Consortium(W3C)
WAI Interest Group home page: http://www.w3.org/WAI/IG
Unsubscribe? Send "unsubscribe" subject line: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org
Questions? http://www.w3.org/WAI/IG/Overview.html#Uselist or wai@w3.org